Now "No Status"? Why don't you add some developers to EF development and make it a first class framework? There are LOTS of missing pieces! Listen to your customers and then staff for the requests please!

I don't deal with large applications all that often and I've just come across two where one has to read data from the other's. It doesn't make sense to put the two databases together, or to have some n-tier solution where web services are called and entities are cached etc. Direct access to the database gives us best performance and is reasonably maintainable.

Right now we're using views and synonyms to surface parts of the first database into the second. It's not a huge burden, but less elegant than, say, EF understanding multiple database and being able to query across them.

This isn't a wish or a want... IT'S ESSENTIAL. @Ladislav: while I respect you, sometimes you can't see past the end of your nose... no fuss Cross database and Cross server querying is totally within the realm of the ORM - the whole point of it is to isolate you from the physical persistance store - for example, just look at what Azure does for servers (makes them disappear into a single entity is the answer in case you're struggling)

Why was this feature not added from the get go? I think this was a huge blunder. Because it added dozens of hours of coding in my team to achieve what EF cannot do right now. so our decision was to not use EF at all for this project and build our own EF to support multiple DBs. This is costing me money.

This is required for enterprise project development. We are currently using multiple db's with MS SQL on single db server. We are also using synonym and merging edmx files.as a work-around. Please add this feature.

A direct mapping of synonyms is required. One of Entity Framework's claims is that it works best with Microsoft SQL Server, so this is expected. Although there are ways of merging edmx files together that's not a direct approach which we expect to have when using the Entity Framework